A password ?

You use passwords any time you need to login into some account: forum, email, bank... It is the very first protection against unauthorized users.

Your password is therefore extremely important and you must keep it secret; so, if you write it somewhere, keep it in a safe place.However, passwords are always subject to one type of attack: brute force. This means that the attacker try to find your password by trying each possible password: so the complexer the password, the better.With a 8 chars password, the number of possible passwords are:

Only numbers: 100,000,000

Only tiny letters (a to z): 208,827,064,576

Capital and tiny letters: 53,459,728,531,456

Capital and tiny letters and numbers: 218,340,105,584,896

All symbols on a normal keyboard: > 10,000,000,000,000,000

Supposing that an attacker can try 100,000 passwords per second, it would try all passwords in more than 13,000,000 years... so it will never find it.Obs: I will talk later about more complex passwords and keyfiles. These use symbols that doesn't exist on your keyboard and a lot longer. In these cases, the needed time is thousands of times the age of the universe !

How to remember passwords

The best is of course not to physically store it (write). I suggest then to make a sentence you won't forget (as a proverb, a song) and take, for instance, the first and the last letters of each word, once tiny, once capital.Example:
It is raining cat and dogsbecomesItIsRgCtAdDsYou can then change "s" to "$", or whatever letters you want:ItI$RgCtAdD$

You see, it isn't difficult !

You can use the password generator to see examples of great passwords.